English Dept's Sheehan Lecture: Lee Edelman, "Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint"

Lee Edelman chairs the English Department at Tufts University where he is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature. A central figure in queer theory, his work brings together Lacanian analysis, rhetorical criticism, and the politics of social and cultural representation. He ignited an ongoing controversy with his most recent book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke University Press, 2004), which initiated what many now call “the anti-social turn” in queer theory.

His current project, a book tentatively titled Bad Education, thinks about queerness, the negation of value, and the ideology of the aesthetic. He has written numerous essays on topics including film studies, modern poetry, psychoanalysis, pornography, and contemporary art, and he frequently addresses the complicated relations between critical analysis and political action. In addition to No Future, he is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (Stanford University Press, 1987) and Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1994).

This event is free and open to students and the public.